Malvern Vale Hotel

Dad and Mum were staying for the weekend so for dinner on Saturday night we thought we’d take them to the Malvern Vale Hotel. The Malvern Vale is our closest pub and we met the owner just after we moved into our new house last year when he had organised a Christmas street party. Virginia and I had been to the Malvern Vale a few years earlier when we reviewed it on thursdaynighttennis.org. I decided not to read that previous review until I’d written this one but did remember that we didn’t particularly like the feel of the place as it is a classic pokies pub. That hasn’t changed. The menu had lots to choose from but I had already decided on the parma as that is the bread and butter for this type of pub. One nice surprise for me was that on the drinks list they had Dominique Portet rose which is a bit of a favourite of mine. Dad ordered the open steak sandwich and really enjoyed it. Mum ordered the pumpkin gnocchi and also thoroughly enjoyed it especially the fact that it had little pieces of pumpkin in it rather than just a pumpkin sauce. Virginia had the seafood paella and was also impressed. It had a very generous amount of seafood and I had a taste and the flavour was impressive. My parma was a little on the boring side and there weren’t enough chips. I did find out that a couple may have gone missing before I got to them but even so there weren’t enough.

Overall the service was friendly and the experience was fine but it is still very much a pokie and sports pub and even in the bistro there are TV screens to keep up with the footy score. There also isn’t any table service. This is all fairly normal for this style of pub but the prices on the menu were a bit more than they should have been. I think if the meal prices met the feeling of the pub and the parma had been better it may have earned a 7 but in the end we are giving it 6 stars.